The Banana Peel Project

A relatively young man hobbles, in good spirits, into a medical marijuana cooperative.  He’s proud of having made it to the co-op today, his new aluminum cane giving him the style, confidence, and stability to find new places to interrogate, explore, and (yes) even to obtain his medicine.  And mirrored windows notwithstanding, this place showed promise: a quiet waiting room, clear instructions for how to fill out the new patient form, and an elegant display of free stickers and fliers.  Maybe at one point these publications were to be found only in head shops and sex toy emporiums, but (today at least) they were just another glossy mound of magazines in just another doctor’s office.

The rest is pretty typical of cooperative practice these days.  The usual forms, the usual friendly-and-knowing eye contact with the man behind the desk, the usual minute of tense conversation while the patient is verified over the internet, the usual moment of unsurprised relief when the clearance is granted and the unmistakable scent of lovingly grown hydroponic cannabis oozes out the open door.

This, the young man told himself, is what a cooperative should look like: a clean glass counter, a well-stocked fridge in the corner, and row after row of tall glass jars containing well-pruned flowers of every shape and shade.  And let’s not forget the genial capped fellow behind the counter.  It’s a good situation.

“What can I get for you?  You’re definitely one of my more legitimate patients–do you mind me asking what the problem is?” He smiled, a look of real compassion of the kind you’d expect in a place like this, and pointed with a single finger at the aluminum cane.

If the patient had had just one more moment to think, one more second to remember where he was and what he was doing in this place, his words would have come out very differently.  But the question was honest, and the genuine look of care on the pharmacist’s face pulled him out of whatever cleverly constructed rhetorical response might have emerged instead.  Instead, he responded thusly:

“Actually, it has nothing to do with this,” gesturing briskly with his free hand to the wavering prosthetic.  “Actually, I’m looking for something good for anxiety and sometimes depression: a hybrid certainly, but indica-dominant.”

But as his eyes and nose surveyed the selection, the fellow’s words continued to echo in the young man’s brain: “You’re definitely one of my more legitimate patients.”  Never before had a human being in this man’s position hailed him in this way.  Not once had a pharmacist, a bartender, a drug store cashier, a hospital administrative assistant, or a drug dealer ever asked what it was that ailed him.  That had always been, if not exactly beside the point, but certainly silent in transactions like this.  The uses to which drugs–or, for that matter, the cane on which our protagonist now leaned–would be put were always a powerfully present absence in such places.

In the politics of psychopharmacology, some of the bad guys are good and some of the good guys are bad.  All is up for grabs when personal technology changes hands in the high-stakes game of drug politics, a more heterogeneous field than we may think.  Articulating the stakes of a politics of psychopharmacology is as much for the benefit of those who resist dominant regimes as for those who refuse to hear what other voices have to say.

Compassion, too, is a fluctuating field.  Not all care is created equal.  A revolution can be done wrong.  These are the thoughts that the young man should have been thinking as he calculated the differences between Cotton Candy Headband, Green Crack, Hindu Kush, and Bubblegum Skunk.  But he was too placed, to certain of his surroundings, too confident that in this liminal space all words spoken would be spoken from the side of Truth.

And that’s when the jolly fellow behind the counter nodded his head and smiled.  “Anxiety, huh?  I know just what you mean: that’s what I use it for.”

What does it mean to live in a space?  And what do we do once we have recognized that the choices we make are not, after all, entirely our own?  Are we left floating in a haze of it-doesn’t-matter?  Are we left to choose between boundless freedom and the imprisonment of law?  The choice between freedom and law is a false one.  At the core of both is a vision of pure necessity, of a need to remember, recover, or return to a truth hidden somewhere deep in our bodies.

“Habit” and “inhabit” have more than a passing affinity.  To remember that we live in a space is to remember that certain habits are encouraged and others are not.  Driving an automobile, we might say that we are “encouraged” to drive on a certain side of the road. We might even say that we are “in the habit” of driving on one side or the other.  But it is hard to imagine that one who was not in the habit of driving on the appropriate side of the road would be at it for very long.  When we live in a space, a space that we design in cooperation with others, there is a fine line between habit and compulsion, its evil twin.

An unfolding entanglement of reasons, immense and cloudlike in its scope and organization, is suddenly and without trepidation quietly brought together in a single point.  It dissolves into fragments whatever it touches, slicing things into bits and allowing them to fall gently into neatly arranged stacks.  This-is, this-is-not, this-could-be, this-will-be.  The groping feeling is gone, and it is no longer necessary to wonder if a thought will attach to its object or simply fall away.  Thoughts are sticky now, and what was once a hesitant touch is now (though only for a short time) a confident incision.  Things just get done; it just works.

There is a compatibility with boxes, inscriptions, categories, lines, points, things, and surfaces that was not there before.  It has the feeling of what-should-be.  It has the feeling of something I should have already been doing.  It has the feeling of being restored to a state that I was never in to begin with.  It has the feeling of being elegantly and invisibly persuaded that all is as it should be.  It has the feeling of truth.

Perhaps there are other options, other ways of negotiating this line between what-must-be-done and what-it-is-possible-to-do.  No solution is a solution for very long, and no problem is ever really fully solved.  We need to be strategic in our choices, and get comfortable moving between habits and opportunities.  Even though thought may, for a time, “just work,” it will not do so forever.

“Who’s watching your drink? Let your hair down, not your guard.” In bright pink with big black block lettering, of course.

“Enjoy your night.  Know your limits.  Zero tolerance towards violence.”

A textual exhibition of the physiology of alcohol (and its rapacious others).  A drug defines its own textuality, its own social limits, its own legal presence — but only partly.  There’s a flexibility in the materiality of a drug, a malleability in the uses to which it can be put.  But these words — materiality, physiology, even chemistry or biology — are nonspecific, perhaps even incapable of allowing an easy movement into a zone of activity within which it is possible to affect.

A profound boredom is at work here. “I don’t know what the weather might do” is perhaps a fitting phrase, one that relates the uncertainty of being (on) alcohol: an uncertain space, a language that is almost precise, a danger that is merely apparent and probably kind: “a tiger in a trance.”

Just as “to listen” is to let the words wash over us, to write is to allow words a space to play.  Writing is hardly an analytical exercise, hardly an exercise in circumscription and determination (and least of all logocentrism) — especially when we are writing on (on) reason.  Reason — logos — needs something to bounce off of, something against and for which to assert itself and, in doing so, govern the landscape of its own impossibility.

To translate writing (as logos) into action (as ethos) is not to somehow assimilate every word, to incorporate every every morpheme of what is written — it is to have faith, to surrender (without throwing in the towel) to the play of words.  Words (and worlds) have their own agency, their own desire to move thought and action, to render logos different from what it is.

To surrender to logos is to critique logos, and it requires a recognition of things not for what they may be or what they signify, but for what they appear to be on the surface — what they are now, here.  Ignore signification and textuality.  Let being (on-on) shape its own path.

All this, of course, is to render strange.  It is the experience of traveling while still at home.  Trip at weddings.  Get high everywhere.  Be (on).

A sign can be a sign, and nothing more –: who’s watching your drink?